Self-Driving Cars Ownership

Self driving vehicles will make this a lot more accessible since the car can essentially operate like Uber without a driver. Hail a car via App (or schedule) the car picks you up and drops you off where you need to go, and then its on its way to pick up the next person. It doesn't require a human to park the car or find the car to pick it up. Far fewer cars will be needed to move people around efficiently, if all the cars aren't parked at offices all day long and at your home in the ev

As others have noted, autonomous vehicles may actually lead to less car use. Currently, many people must own cars for certain use cases. Because of this, for any given trip the decision to take car vs. other means is based on the marginal cost of car usage. In contrast, if people no longer need to own cars because of autonomous taxis, the decision of car vs. other reflects the ammortized cost of car use, which will be far higher than the marginal cost. Put another way, there

Autonomous taxis would largely revolutionize car ownership. Why own your own car, when you can pay a fraction of the price to have one available whenever you need it, and never when you don't?

I don't think many people will necessarily own their own self-driven cars. Why have something there idle when it could be doing other work? More likely it will operate more like a taxi or by subscription. Or even own your own, but have it used in a pool to recoup costs, a bit like swap-n-go gas bottle refills.

Driverless cars will reduce the cost of taking a taxi such that it may become viable for car owners to completely opt out of owning a car. But if 10 million people need to get to work parallel to each other what does it really matter if the cars are Ubers or self owned?

You have basically described Uber (1). No co-incidence that Uber is interested in self-driving cars. "Do I want to own one?" is the wrong question, why bother owning one when you can summon one when you want it?1) https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/249958

In a world where self-driving capabilities are in almost every car, car ownership will be vastly reduced. Most trips will happen through some variety of Uber. The exceptions will be people who need to store things in their car like car seats or work equipment.

Once self-driving taxis are cheaper than car ownership, that all-or-nothing dynamic goes away. Start out using the taxis, switch to cheaper public transport wherever it's available.

Presumably self driving cars would lead to dirt cheap taxi and car sharing services, reducing the need for everyone to own a car. Yould even have things like letting your car be a taxi during the day while you work

It's possible the incremental cost of a driverless car trip from a shared pool (like zipcar in that respect) would be higher than the cost of driving your own car, due to the fact that when you're not using your personal car it's just sitting around in your driveway collecting rust. That would be an incentive to reduce the number of trips.